Pakistan have had plenty of fast bowlers with a touch of magic about them over the years. Unfortunately, that kind of transcendence would require an additional supernatural feat these days, because any act of high pace sorcery would first necessitate the shape-shifting transformation of a military-medium dobbler.

Selector and director of high performance Aaqib Javed said before this series that Pakistan had prioritised pace when picking their squad. At the time, this seemed an understandable position. Now we’re underway, the claim would be better labelled ‘perplexing, trending towards laughable’.

It’s no great surprise that Mohammad Abbas is trundling in at 120km/h, because that’s simply what he does and he has always made it work. Mohammad Abbas will trundle the shit out of you. Just how much force do you honestly need to apply when you’re sneaking up behind someone and slitting their throat? ‘Just enough’ is the answer.

The problem is that rather than complementing Abbas’s medium-pace with a fast bowler or two, Pakistan appear instead to be striving to compliment it by selecting “quicks” who are no such thing.

Khurram Shahzad started at 130km/h and slid. Mohammad Ali just about managed 135km/h a couple of times but ended up stinging like a butterfly, delivering a whole series of 125km/h bouncers.

“We are concerned with the pace of our fast bowlers,” Javed had said. “It is unacceptable that their speeds drop to 126kph on the second or third day of a Test, which was the case in Bangladesh.”

He was pretty clear on this. “We feel we need pace,” he said and revealed they’d used speed guns at a recent camp to decide who to pick for the West Indies and England.

This is the bit that gets us. Any nation (and especially Pakistan) can get a bit lost in the selection process. It happens. You turn up in a foreign country, unpack your suitcase and think, “Oh, blood and sand! We didn’t bring any fast bowlers!”

But Pakistan thought about this. They remembered. Fast bowlers were top of their list. Aaqib says he and his selectors identified them and packed them, and yet here we are. Only one guy in the attack has a plausible case to be considered even fast-medium, let alone fast – and even then, only when he’s fresh.

The Pakistan Cricket Board’s shambolic mismanagement of Shaheen Afridi is a widely accepted truth and most agree that Naseem Shah has been similarly blunted. But that’s only a couple of players. Pakistan is a big country. Where’s everyone else?

> What’s happening with Shaheen Shah Afridi’s knee?

When you look on this Headingley attack that is supposedly the product of actively prioritising pace, it’s almost as if the national board has put together a high friction talent funnel to enable it to mismanage at scale. Players enter it at speed and barely dribble out of the other end.

We once wrote about how the Pakistan bowling attack was not merely a group of cricketers, but a fundamental cricket concept. For us, for a time, The Pakistan Bowling Attack wasn’t just the best bowlers who represented the country, but the very foundations of the invaluable idea that a bad situation can be turned around with a moment of inspiration.

This current incarnation of the Pakistan bowling attack isn’t too far off being the exact opposite of that.

Site news: If you’re reading the email, you’ll have realised we’ve gone back to sending out full articles. We switched to excerpts a while back because the emailer strips out a lot of the formatting from the web versions of the articles – elements that we feel can really add something.

The downside was that it forced you to click through every time you wanted to read something in full. This is an unnecessary extra hurdle when you probably just want to stay in your mailbox. It also makes it less likely you’ll forward articles to other people. (Please do that, by the way.)

So it’s back to full articles in emails and we’ll try to strike a balance where we don’t entirely renounce interesting formatting on the site itself. Apologies in advance for any sections that end up weird or confusing – it’s not always easy to see what will and won’t work in advance.

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Please tell us the secret of managing the very difficult emotions that arise when watching the Pakistan bowling attack against England

Some things change, but other things don’t. It’s still pretty likely that England will be able to win the one Test match Ollie Robinson is capable of playing each series. Perhaps they should schedule more two-Test series.

“It’s not often you get half a ball,” said Robinson after play yesterday. This is sort of correct in that they pretty much always come in pairs. 

He’s right that it’s an area where people don’t often do things by halves though. Perhaps this fractional moderation is a central pillar of Joe Root’s new strategy to persuade his men to become sensible adults. “Remember: half pints only now, lads.”

This particular bisection was because Robinson and Josh Tongue could both lay claim to the ball after taking five Pakistan wickets apiece. We haven’t yet heard what method the groundstaff employed though. Apparently the surgical procedure only took five minutes.

Speaking of surgery, it’s been reported that England’s first-choice all-rounder, Sam Curran, is out for the season with a groin issue. This means it’s halves for Root when it comes to his spin attack too.

As we laid out in our article on this earlier in the month, two half-spinners (Root and Dan Lawrence) do not actually add up to a full one. They are in fact only marginally more use than two detached halves of cricket ball.

This was no real issue on a damp day in Leeds in one of the Tests when Robinson was available – although even in those circumstances there was a brief period when Pakistan were about 90-2 when you started to think, “Okay, Joe, do you have half an idea what to do when this happens?”

Fortunately, on this occasion, Tongue’s idiosyncratic method of bowling from a left-arm angle despite using his right-arm again proved not half bad.

You may or may not have noticed that we don’t run ads on this website. That means that until AI labs are compelled by legislation¹ to recompense writers for literally just stealing their work, King Cricket has only one source of funding: our Patreon campaign.

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1. Ha! As if! ︎

It’s hard to remember a Test match when England didn’t change their captain, or their coach, or both. Speaking of that sort of thing… Pakistan are in town!

A few months ago, Pakistan had the honour of becoming the first team to be whitewashed in successive series of two or more matches by Bangladesh. That doesn’t sound as damning as it perhaps did a week ago, but it’s only part of a longer-term trend. They haven’t won a Test series outside Asia since 2017.

They do however have Mohammad Abbas.

Given the tragically attenuating unpredictability of the Pakistan Test team, it’s hard to envision any kind of victory that wouldn’t hang off the aye-aye fingers of their foremost 30-something medium-pacer.

Then again, it’s barely rained in England for the last three months. Grass won’t grow overnight, despite a recent return to a more familiar level of precipitation, so maybe they’ll be able to stick with the Noman Ali and Sajid Khan and absolutely no other bowlers strategy that served them so well in 2024.

There’s certainly no denying they have the edge over England in the spin department for these first couple of matches.

What they sadly lack, however, is a reluctant captain who’s been press-ganged into leading the team again after not massively enjoying the job first time around. Unlike Joe Root, Babar Azam is injured after being hit in Beckenham (not a euphemism). Salman Agha will therefore take charge – whether willingly or unwillingly, we do not know.

Craptain Part II: Where do you stand on Joe Root’s second coming?

Dan Liebke’s anonymous former Australian cricketer has this Australia team down as a two-stroke pull-start Victa Commando lawnmower – “an absolute weapon of a thing” but also “an absolute shit of a thing to start”. Presumably that makes Bangladesh some sort of battery-powered Flymo. Halfway through a Test series, their opponents will be hoping the tourists are already out of charge.

The great thing about Australia’s defeat over the weekend is that the one guy they were almost certainly dropping at the point when they’d basically lost was the guy who then made a hundred before they’d actually lost.

Stellar stuff from Cameron Green: an exquisite blend of futility and self-preservation that wouldn’t have looked out of place from a 1990s England cricketer. There is no higher praise.

Somewhat bizarrely, Green’s Test batting average (33.69) moved above Ian Botham’s (33.54) with that second innings hundred. His bowling average is a little way off though. His 39 wickets at 39.82 in fact put him fractionally behind Allan Border with 39 wickets at 39.1. (A return that was sufficiently well calibrated to earn AB a mention in our feature on the best part-time bowlers in the history of Test cricket.)

Still though, Green’s surely ducked under the axe once more (no mean feat for a man of his stature). So who will that lethal blade strike instead?

The queue to not play Test cricket for Australia is an increasingly busy one, but we’d guess it’s currently headed by Marnus Labuschagne and Jake Weatherald. We’re not sure in which order.

Marnus? We know where we are with Marnus. The man’s turned just-about-playing-for-Australia into an art form over the last three years.

Weatherald though is another matter. He looked just horrible in the Ashes and this seems to have led him to reinvent his technique entirely. The end result is that he still looks just horrible, but now in a quite radically different way.

On top of this, there’s also zero chance Australia’s first-choice bowling attack is going to make it through the 20 (or 21) Tests scheduled over the next 12 months. If we’re honest, the fact they’ve got through one in a row is newsworthy, but you’d anticipate a far more meaningful brand of attrition than mere niggles and rest periods in the year ahead – Pat Cummins is the young scamp of the group at 33.

All in all, Australia are going to have to find some new players. Fortunately for them, they aren’t exactly short of Tests in which to trial them.

You can tell Joe Root’s done this before. When you’re entirely new to the job, it’s a tall order to get through a 25-minute interview without saying anything. That’s pretty much what he managed speaking to Mike Atherton earlier this week though.

Root says he’s not going to make the same mistakes as last time. He’s gained a whole different perspective over the last four years. He’s not going to rip things up; he’s going to fine-tune and build on what’s gone before.

This is the nature of things at this point though; when it’s all good intentions and theory. Root’s second coming as England Test captain is all nebulous and abstract right now, which means his answers can be too. Pressed on specifics from the past, he was inclined to fire up his smoke machine before inviting us to squint into a decidedly hard to decipher future.

None of this tells us much. But what else were we likely to get? It would be pretty wild to say you had every intention of repeating your previous mistakes. He was never going to criticise his friend and predecessor. Joe Root doesn’t make drop too many media clunkers – that’s why he’s in the job.

England’s freshly microwaved leader has made one decision though and he explained it perfectly.

Mandatory bedtime’s been put to bed. Because it doesn’t achieve anything.

“If you want guys to take responsibility on the field, they’ve got to feel like they can be grown adults off it,” was how Root put it.

“If you are afraid to trust, you will lose,” is the Rayden version.

Same-same.

What is a curfew but preemptive punishment for crimes not yet committed? In the continuing absence of ECB precogs, it’s also a frag grenade countermeasure where plenty of bystanders get peppered with shrapnel.

If you were Joe Root, with an almost entirely unblemished track record of making fully adult decisions for the entire duration of your incredibly long international career, you’d probably feel a bit put out if one day your boss said he was going to have to take control of your bedtime.

‘Why? Because I apparently can’t be trusted? Hmm, I think I might be immediately reversing this one as soon as I’m back in charge,’ you’d think.

Being a middle-aged batter does not automatically imbue a person with the tactical, strategic, psychological and empathetic qualities that make for a good Test cricket captain. Yet this is still for the most part how we pick them.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Joe Root. We love him as a batter and a bloke. If anything, we admire him even more for being willing to return to a job that makes his life unutterably miserable and for which he is demonstrably unqualified, simply because someone else feels that’s the best thing to do right now. 

We didn’t think much of Joe Root’s first stint as captain. He did the job for a long time and if anything only seemed to get worse at it as time wore on. 

There is a big and legitimate covid asterisk to that. Much of what he had to shoulder was irregular and he was also frequently hamstrung by Eoin Morgan’s limited overs teams getting first dibs on many of England’s best players. 

But he also – and there’s enough evidence to state this plainly – wasn’t any good. He was a wispy, ethereal leader, blown about by forces outside his control; a well-meaning ghost, who everyone liked, blighted by a fundamental incorporeality that prevented him from having any meaningful impact.

Unable to move on

Ghosts famously tend to be tethered to our earthly plane by unfinished business of course, so perhaps that’s what we’re dealing with here.

It would be quite lovely if Root could make use of everything he’s learned since that first stint as captain and write over some of those memories with better ones. Our issue is that we find it very, very hard to see that happening.

People can get better at things – that’s undeniable – but starting points matter. An ageing village cricketer isn’t going to become international standard given an extra net session or two each week – the gap to make up is just too great. He can improve, sure; he can learn things; but he won’t suddenly unearth the one central quality he truly lacks, which is any kind of natural aptitude for the job. 

We have no doubt Root will do things differently this time around. He won’t make some of the mistakes he made in the past. It’s just that quite often these mistakes he’s learned from will be mistakes that other captains would never have made in the first place.

Aptitude

As a batter, Joe Root soaks up experiences and processes them brilliantly. He has an incredible ability to work things out.

Why does Joe Root always seem to work it out and no-one else does?

For whatever reason, this preternatural ability does not extend – has never extended – to captaincy, where he routinely seems to lag three steps adrift, devoid of any abiding throughline which might shape his decision-making.

This was most apparent when Ben Stokes took over and everyone immediately started talking about how much fun they were having. The unavoidable implication of that was that everything before – playing under Root – had been dreadful.

The players feeling a bit better was only half of it though. England also starting winning almost every game in incredible style despite picking much the same guys who had previously been losing almost every game.

One aspect of that change was that the players suddenly felt wanted, supported and secure. Unlike Root, Stokes just very obviously had a feel for this side of the job. He didn’t say he thought a player was great before leaving them out of the next game. As much as possible, he picked guys and stuck with them. He embiggened Broad and Anderson; he backed Jack Leach and spin bowling more generally; he nursed Rehan Ahmed to success on his debut and he performed some kind of pig-headed magic trick with Tom Hartley.

Obviously, you can’t continue relentlessly backing people forever – players get old, players lose form – but you could see how empathy underpinned the way Stokes approached these things. It helped him get more out of people. England weren’t great, but Stokes’s captaincy made them a lot better.

Root just doesn’t seem to have these qualities. Or, more accurately, he lacks them in the context of leading his team-mates in cricket matches.

It’s often said Root has a strong sense of team-mates’ moods – the things that might be bothering them; what they might be worrying about. Maybe being the boss negates this somehow. Or perhaps the issue is that his default reaction is plain, straightforward sympathy rather than finding a way to address those feelings (or prevent them in the first place).

Being captain is perhaps more about shaping mental states than responding to them. Root has some black marks against him on this one. He is the captain who waged a campaign of unnecessary omissions to undermine Jack Leach until there was nothing much left of him, and he is also the man who said, “I think there are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” about a fast bowler whose bones he at that point seemed hell-bent on stress fracturing.

Root just doesn’t instinctively get this stuff. Nor much of the rest of it really. Only a few weeks ago, he showed he was still perfectly happy to spend a long hour failing to bounce out the lower order.

We love Joe Root. He really is a great guy. He is a man who doesn’t know anything other that to try his hardest and do his best and that is admirable. We doubt it’s occurred to him that by taking on the England Test captaincy and failing to force a different choice, he’s almost certainly making things worse.

But, you know – good luck to him. Hopefully Stephen Fleming and the other players can help him find peace.

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So Joe Root’s England Test captain again. That, perhaps, is a topic for next week. More immediately, we’ve been given a sighter as to what this next Joe Root England team might look like and the first one has Dan Lawrence in it – which is exciting and depressing and interesting and also maybe not that important actually.

For seasoned Joe Root captaincy watchers, the immediate assumption here is that we’re immediately going back to late era Root, where frontline spinners were spurned in favour of as many right-arm fast-medium bowlers as he could muster, garnished with a couple of part-time spinners to provide the faintest mist of variety.

Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

Dan Lawrence certainly fits the bill as a shallow-Rooted spin option. All three of his Test wickets so far have come under the Yorkshireman.

He also bowls a fair bit for Surrey, who seem to have provided the template for how England ‘balance’ their team these days – which is to say, with no spinner.

If you’ll excuse us quoting ourself here: we have endless time for Dan Lawrence’s bowling, but that doesn’t make him a bowler. If anything, a very large part of the appeal lies in all the ways in which he isn’t.

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

England say Lawrence will bat at six in the first Test against Pakistan and that Jordan Cox will sub in for Jacob Bethell at three. That means the only real question is which four bowlers they’ll pick, but clearly they’ll pick four seamers.

But then just when we were preparing ourselves for an era of all-rounderism that would be fudged in a dull and predictable way, selector Marcus North threw in a zooter: “Sam Curran is certainly a player of interest for us.”

North went on to say that because Curran has some niggles, he wasn’t considered for the first two Tests, but the hope was he would ‘become an option’ for the third Test.

The way we read that is that Curran is in fact the first choice and Lawrence is the stand-in.

If Curran’s in the first XI, this next incarnation of the England team could look very different to the one that takes the field in the first Test, because Curran was a load bearing strut during the early era of Captain Root, when he also brought us Total Bits and Pieces Cricket.

Back then, with no great confidence in anyone’s batting or bowling, England stocked their side with maybes: cricketers who could bat a bit and bowl a bit and who might do a job in the right circumstances. This resulted in seven different bowling options and most styles of bowling available to call on.

Total Bits and Pieces Cricket: Is England’s current approach the future or simply the best way for them to do things at the minute?

With better specialists available at the minute, they won’t go to those extremes again, but even so, as a left-arm medium-pacer who’s probably a number seven batter, Curran does encourage more interesting downstream selections than Lawrence.

Lawrence passes as half a spinner in the same way Will Jacks did. Even though two half-spinners only in reality equal two half-spinners and not a whole one, England still cling to their wrong-headed maths on this issue, so his inclusion alongside Root means they perceive that spin bowler box as ticked.

Sam Curran, in contrast, is not a spinner, even though he sometimes bowls that slowly. England are therefore likely to actually pick a tweaker when he’s in the team. Based on the first Test squad, that would be Shoaib Bashir, which would be interesting. It is however just as likely that they’ll weigh the breathtaking adequacy of Curran’s batting and instead bolster the order with someone like Rehan Ahmed.

At this point you might wonder whether Lawrence reenters the equation as someone who can both bat and bowl spin – but no, he doesn’t. Because that would make Curran one of your four main bowlers and – man alive! – no-one wants that.

If you squint hard enough, you can just about select Sam Curran as either a batter or bowler. It’s just that then, when you’re picking the next bloke, you suddenly gain total clarity that he is actually neither of those things and you’re therefore immediately overwhelmed with a desire to plug all the leaky gaps.

This is very messy and very fun and a great deal more interesting than where this first Joe Root Test squad initially suggested we were heading.

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Stephen Fleming has been appointed England Test coach. This brings to mind the way young Grampa Simpson summed up his preference for American footballer Johnny Unitas over the more rebellious looking Joe Namath. “Now Johnny Unitas – there’s a haircut you could set your watch to.”

England have tried wild untamed facial hair and rebellion and change. Now they’re going to try Fleming. 

Sensible name, sensible reputation, sensible demeanour

Fleming has been what you might call ‘active’ for the whole of our time writing about cricket – first as a captain, then as a coach. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t say we’ve been struggling to accommodate the strong feelings he’s generated in us in that time. 

As a player, he averaged an almost perfectly calibrated 40.06, which is at once both really impressive and hugely unremarkable.

Everyone admired his captaincy – although his ability to wring performances out of a supposedly relatively weak New Zealand side seems a little less impressive these days given they’ve been punching above their stated weight pretty much ever since. It might be time for another weigh-in, you know. 

As a coach, he got Chennai Super Kings to the IPL final more often than not and it is here where his air of consistency stands out most. In a league and format all but defined by change, he ran the team for 17 years and in that time consistently picked many of the same players, season after season, until they got old – and sometimes beyond.

Like Johnny Unitas, Fleming does not seem like a man easily cast about by the fickle winds of headlines, fashion or public opinion. There are worse qualities you could bring to the England Test coach job right now.

Plus he’s friends with Brendon McCullum, which has got to be useful now we’re firmly into the dysfunctional office politics era of England coaching where your ability to lay claim to key human resources is such a central contributor to hitting those all important KPIs.

Sometimes you switch on a cricket match and you’re pretty sure Manchester are playing, but Aiden Markram’s batting with Tim Seifert, and Saqib Mahmood’s bowling, and you don’t know what clothes the teams wear any more, and you don’t know what the teams are called any more, and you suddenly realise you are a cricket writer who doesn’t even know which team’s which.

You dimly remember that Manchester are the Super Giants and Aiden Markram’s team seems to have a picture of an elephant next to it. Elephants are big. Maybe that’s Manchester?

That would make the other team… who exactly? What is that other symbol?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? (It’s a phoenix. It’s Birmingham Phoenix.)

We are not anti-Hundred, but there are hurdles here and, at this time of year, when the schools break up and there’s all sorts of other stuff going on anyway, we simply do not have the jumping in us to clear even a single one of them.

Had we approached the same match from another direction, we’d have seen a scorecard saying MSG v BP. We’d recognise the individual players, but to our eyes they’d have been combined in weird and unexpected ways.

We are not good at unravelling uncommon abbreviations at the best of times. We do not follow transer news. None of these things helps us.

> The Hundred’s having a player auction so that it can be even more like a watered-down version of the IPL

The upshot is that we wouldn’t write anything. But of course England aren’t playing either at the moment, so we don’t write about them either. Before we know it, days are passing and the website is stagnating.

Some years we’ve tried to force it, but we’ve recognised this is becoming a regular thing and honestly, we’re sort of starting to embrace it. We all need downtime. It’s a bit odd that ours seems to arrive in the middle of the cricket season, but there you go.

So apologies for the intermittent service of late, but we assure you our energy is better conserved for later deployment and we promise that time will come.

You can always buy and read our book while you wait for us. (It’s ideal holiday reading! No, really – even from an unbiased point of view!) You can also sign up for email, which saves having to check the site for updates.

The Hundred sales: What do these billionaires honestly hope to get out of their investment?

Garry Sobers was made for cricket. More specifically, having been born with six fingers on each hand, he was made to be an umpire. It was odd then that he should spurn the world of ball counting, jumper carrying and light meter wielding in favour of mastering pretty much every other aspect of the game.

A good few of you know that this website got its name from the first feature we ran at the start of January 2006. There wasn’t much cricket going on at that time, so we did a countdown of the 10 most ludicrously excellent and colourful active players and crowned our winner ‘King Cricket’ – which we felt was a sufficiently overblown title that no-one would ever mistake it for anything other than a joke.

We put Brian Lara at Number 1 – we’re still in love with that backlift – but a week later that post had scrolled off the front page and, to our ongoing anguish, confused readers began calling us King Cricket – a name no-one would self-apply where we come from. By the time we moved to this domain a year and a bit later, we’d given up arguing – we were, alas, King Cricket.

Except we weren’t, because a few years later we discovered that not only had the name already been deployed, Cy Grant had written a whole damn song.

It’s an okay song – perhaps a bit too catchy, to the extent we worry you’ll unsubscribe from our email once it’s lodged in your brain for unwitting, reflexive retrieval.

It’s better and more complimentary than any songs that’ll get written about you though. Clearly Garry Sobers impressed people.

One of the final pieces we published on the old domain was the old Don Bradman v Garry Sobers thought experiment. Our not-too-subtle point was that Sobers was a way better cricketer because cricket does actually involve bowling. A team comprising only Don Bradmans would spend an awful long time in the field.

You can also run this sort of made-up match against other all-rounders. While there are certainly circumstances where other players might be able to win a (most likely timeless) Test against Sobers, it’s impossible to imagine he wouldn’t come out on top overall were you to continue playing matches across all the various conditions that are thrown up in the longest format.

For example, while Imran Khan and early Botham were superior bowlers, they were inferior batters and certain conditions could really neuter their bowling. It’s a lot tougher to corner Sobers that way.

It’s a cliché to talk about how an all-rounder allows you to balance the side, but Sobers delivered so much more than viable batting and bowling. We used to joke about Moeen Ali’s willingness to plug almost any gap for England, but the Sobers sealant was way, way, way more thorough than that.

Left-arm bowlers are hugely desirable. Simply through offering a different angle, they become more valuable than a right-arm bowler of similar skill. Sobers was first picked for the West Indies to bowl left-arm finger spin. If you can do that pretty reliably and also make a few runs, you can often carve yourself quite a lengthy Test career.

But there was more. A little while after that, he started bowling capable wrist spin as well. Left-arm wrist spin is the most unusual form of bowling there is. Just about nobody has done it for any length of time in Test cricket. Sobers did it well enough that he could wheel it out whenever it seemed helpful to do so and fall back on the finger spin the rest of the time.

That is already a pretty handy secondary bowling skill, but then, a mere decade into his Test career, he began opening the bowling.

That is just madness. Sobers had been bowling a bit of medium-pace for a while and apparently swung the ball both ways, but plenty of people said he could really get it through as well when he wanted to; that he had a pretty mean bouncer. At a certain point, the West Indies assessed Sobers tertiary bowling style and concluded that he should probably take the new ball ahead of Charlie Griffith.

Let’s pick a Left-Handed All-Time Greats XI

Now think about the downstream ramifications of all this. Sobers wasn’t an all-rounder who was asked to bowl only when conditions were in his favour – which is how the likes of Jacques Kallis kept their bowling averages down – he was an all-rounder who was called upon at every stage of the innings, on every pitch, in all conditions. In fact the harder things got, the more appealing he’d surely become. “Let’s try a bit of left-arm wrist spin” kind of thing.

Not every player who’s labelled an all-rounder shoulders the same workload. Jarrod Kimber happened on a magnificent fact last week, which is that Sobers bowled the same volume of overs each match as Kallis and Ben Stokes combined.

If a bowler like that could average, say, 30 in Test cricket, he’d have a strong case to be considered the most useful cricketer of all time, but Garfield Sobers was also – just by the by – one of the greatest batters there’s ever been.

For almost a decade, he remained the heaviest run-scorer in Test history, while his average of 57.78 is still right up there, beyond any current player who’s played anything more than a handful of games.

But against all odds, that’s still not the full story, is it? Because there are different ways of scoring runs. Teams need slightly different things from their batters at different times and here too Sobers’ talent was almost laughably broad.

Could he go big? Mmyeah. His first Test hundred broke a record that had stood for 20 years and that 365 not out would remain the highest Test score for 30-odd years afterwards.

Could he score quickly when necessary? Well… yeah… You’d think an extra finger on each hand would be a guy’s most obvious association with the number six – but no, it’s not even close.

“My goodness, it’s gone way down to Swansea!”

Every team wants a left-arm opening bowler with a wicked bouncer who can swing it both ways with new ball or old.

Left-arm spinners are valuable too. Wrist spinners doubly so.

Batters who can hit triple hundreds? Handy.

Hitters who can launch every single ball of an over for six? Even in this day and age when people are specifically training to do precisely that, those sorts of players aren’t exactly ten a penny.

Imagine having every single one of those roles covered in your team. And then imagine that you can still pick another 10 players after that.

Oh, and he was an incredibly decent fielder too.

The whole point of ‘King Cricket’ was that it was supposed to be a ridiculous, overblown title; a silly joke label that no cricketer could ever possibly justify.

“King Cricket, King Cricket – Garfield Sobers is his name. King Cricket, King Cricket – Sobers is his name.”

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